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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "pentagon"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Wed, 17 Sep 2014 11:14:00 PDTLA School District Reluctantly Gives Up The Grenade Launchers The Pentagon Gave ThemMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140917/05100828545/la-school-district-relunctantly-gives-up-grenade-launchers-pentagon-gave-them.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140917/05100828545/la-school-district-relunctantly-gives-up-grenade-launchers-pentagon-gave-them.shtmlRadley Balko, who wrote an excellent book on the topic). The issue has finally become at least somewhat mainstream, thanks to the high-profile appearance of militarized police responding to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. This has, at the very least, resulted in at least a few police departments thinking better of their decision to accept surplus military gear from the Defense Department via its 1033 program. And the latest is the Los Angeles School Police Department.

Just last week, MuckRock posted on its site about a FOIA request from California, detailing the military equipment given to school police forces. Just the fact that any military equipment is being given to school police should raise some serious questions, but the one that really stood out was that the LA School Police had been given three grenade launchers, along with 61 assault rifles and one MRAP (mine resistant vehicle -- the big scary looking armored vehicles that have become one of the key symbols of police militarization). Asked to explain itself, the LA School police chief, Steve Zipperman, claimed that the district had actually received the grenade launchers and the rifles all the way back in 2001 (though the MRAP is brand-spanking-new). But, he claimed, we shouldn't worry too much, because the police didn't think of them as "grenade launchers," but rather "ammunition launchers," and they were mainly kept around in case other police needed them:

Zipperman said that although the Pentagon identifies the three launchers as grenade launchers, civilian police call them less-deadly ammunition launchers. He assured me that the school police never had any intention of lobbing grenades at anyone, ever, and that they would not be used against students to launch anything. But as a police department, he said, LAUSD’s finest engage in mutual-aid pacts with other police agencies, and the ability to move those launchers out of storage might come in handy.

As for the assault rifles, Zipperman said they were converted to semiautomatic assault rifles -- why am I not feeling better yet? -- and are used to train a cadre of officers within the department. Those officers in turn are equipped with civilian semiautomatic rifles, which are either kept in locked compartments within their patrol cars, or in more centralized locations, in case of a Columbine High School-type gunman attack.

Either way, with the outrage and backlash growing, the school district police force has now agreed to give up the grenade launchers, but it's keeping the rifles and the MRAP. The department told the LA Times that the rifles were "essential life-saving items" though no evidence is given of what lives they've saved.

That same article at the LA Times quotes someone from the Oakland School Police Department up here in Northern California, who received a "tactical utility truck" from the Pentagon program, saying that the truck is "a rolling public relations vehicle." Public relations how, exactly? That if the police don't like the look of you, they may blow your head off? And then there's this:

"We end up having to bring out a gas can and jumper cables every time we want to drive it — it's only used twice a year."

If they have to bring out the gas can and jumper cables every time they want to use it, it doesn't sound like it's particularly useful in those "emergency" situations we keep hearing about in defense of these programs. If there's suddenly a big emergency, and the police have to go searching for some gas and the jumper cables? Perhaps that just shows how non-"essential" these giveaways are.

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]]>safety first!https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140917/05100828545Thu, 28 Aug 2014 11:32:45 PDTPolice Can't Find A Bunch Of The Military Weapons And Vehicles That The Pentagon Has Been Handing OutTim Cushinghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140827/10480728341/law-enforcement-agencies-losing-military-weapons-vehicles-that-pentagon-has-been-handing-out.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140827/10480728341/law-enforcement-agencies-losing-military-weapons-vehicles-that-pentagon-has-been-handing-out.shtml
Turning police departments into military bases has been one of the side effects of the 1033 program. This program routes military weapons and vehicles (as well as ancillaries like office equipment and medical supplies) to police forces, asking for nothing in return but a small donation and the use of the words "terrorism" or "drugs" on the application form. The program has been extremely popular and the US government can rest easy knowing that its excess inventory won't go to waste.

Only within the past couple of weeks has anyone in the upper echelons of the government expressed concern about the program. President Obama has ordered a review of military hardware in law enforcement's hands, but previous to this move (forced by Ferguson cops' war-like tactics), the only thing heard from federal or local government has been the occasional bit of proposed legislation (including terribly-timed, objectively awful bills).

The program operates with very little oversight. No one in control of the dispersals seems to do any vetting of requests. This results in towns of 7,000 suddenly being confronted with the fact that their local police (all 12 of them) are now in possession of a mine-resistant vehicle.

Fusion has learned that 184 state and local police departments have been suspended from the Pentagon's "1033 program" for missing weapons or failure to comply with other guidelines. We uncovered a pattern of missing M14 and M16 assault rifles across the country, as well as instances of missing .45-caliber pistols, shotguns and 2 cases of missing Humvee vehicles.

When you start losing Humvees, it's a good sign you've got more equipment than you really need. Request forms make these items sound like dire necessities but the one thing most people do with stuff they really need is keep track of where it is. A number of agencies are apparently less than concerned about the whereabouts of their terrorist-fighting equipment, only realizing something's missing when they have to perform their yearly check-in with the government reps.

Fusion found that many of the suspensions occur in February, after police departments conduct their year-end weapons inventory.

So, there's a little bit of accountability present in the program. But it's so minimal as to be nearly non-existent. Law enforcement agencies may rat themselves out by reporting missing equipment, but the Pentagon (home of the Defense Logistics Agency which handles the actual hand outs) seems just as badly organized as the agencies they eighty-six.

The decentralized structure of the program makes it difficult — even for the Pentagon — to keep tabs on the standing of participating police departments, or the weapons they've been issued. Officials at the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which runs the equipment-transfer program, were unable to provide specifics about why various police departments were suspended.

Why is a system that supposedly oversees the transfer of military goods to law enforcement decentralized? Well, it's because of bureaucracy. Every state handles it differently, resulting in data being routed through a variety of local agencies before it finally ends up in the Pentagon's hands. Like a game of telephone played by UN members without the assistance of translators, this "system" often returns inaccurate or incomplete information. In some states, the agency law enforcement reports to is the Dept. of Public Safety. In others, it might be something as obscure as the Dept. of Career Education.

Pulling hard numbers on handouts means sending an FOIA to the CIA, and even if a response is given (like a recent one MuckRock acquired), it only provides raw numbers on what was handed out to each state. Nothing is broken down to individual law enforcement agencies. So, we may know approximately where equipment went, but numbers on how much of it has gone missing is something that can only be estimated by the number of suspensions handed out. Those losing weapons and vehicles don't really want to talk about it.

The state coordinator for California said he was "not authorized" to speak on behalf of the agency he runs, and instead deferred all questions to the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, which declined repeated requests for details on the 10 suspended programs in the state.

And when they do talk about it, you almost wish they hadn't.

Huntington Beach Police Department said it was suspended from the program last year after losing an M16 assault rifle.

“It was discovered during an internal audit,” Huntington Beach Police Lieutenant Mitchell O'Brien told Fusion. “An investigation was inconclusive as to how that occurred.”

That's comforting. "We don't know how it happened or where it is."

Suspensions might hurt but they're apparently not much of a deterrent. The article lists more than a few repeat offenders. Only in rare cases will offenders be required to return the requisitioned items, and in the one case Fusion was able to track down, it was ordered by the state, not the Pentagon.

Increased power with near-zero accountability. That's a hell of a way to run the business of law enforcement.

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]]>have secured parking lots with cameras, still lose Humveeshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140827/10480728341Wed, 4 Jun 2014 08:48:41 PDTPentagon Gets Busy Trademarking After Seeing Disney Try To Cash In On SEAL Team 6Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140527/06320827369/pentagon-gets-busy-trademarking-after-seeing-disney-try-to-cash-seal-team-6.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140527/06320827369/pentagon-gets-busy-trademarking-after-seeing-disney-try-to-cash-seal-team-6.shtmlapplied for a trademark on "SEAL Team 6" just two days after the Navy SEAL's Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden. While public outcry resulted in Disney dropping the trademark application a few weeks later, the situation apparently woke up some trademark lawyers at the Pentagon to get busy trademarking.

The Marines registered only one trademark in 2003 and four in 2008. But as troops came home from Iraq and then Afghanistan, efforts began picking up. In 2010 and the first half of 2011, the Marines registered nine trademarks.

Then Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Disney tried to trademark the name SEAL Team Six, and things ratcheted up from there. The Navy immediately fired back at Disney, filing its own trademark for the phrases “SEAL team” and “Navy SEALs,” terms that, the Navy said in its filing, imply membership in a Navy organization that “develops and executes military missions involving special operations strategy, doctrine and tactics.”

Of course there had been some earlier abuses, including this story we had back in 2008 concerning trademarks on military hardware. Still, it's difficult to see how the government should be able to gain a trademark in the first place on things like the name of a military team or division. Trademarks are supposed to cover use in commerce. And the government isn't going out and selling the "SEAL team." You can make an argument that no one should be able to get such a trademark, but it's unclear why the government should get it at all.

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]]>taxpayer-moneyhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140527/06320827369Fri, 23 May 2014 07:42:13 PDTPentagon Report That Supposedly Shows How Much Harm Snowden Caused... Actually Shows No Such ThingMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140522/18023227342/pentagon-report-that-supposedly-shows-how-much-harm-snowden-caused-actually-shows-no-such-thing.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140522/18023227342/pentagon-report-that-supposedly-shows-how-much-harm-snowden-caused-actually-shows-no-such-thing.shtmlbased on two very questionable assumptions

That everything Snowden "touched" while employed at the NSA, he took with him and gave to reporters -- amounting to something like 1.7 million documents.

That all of those files are in the hands of America's adversaries

As many people have highlighted -- both of those claims are extremely questionable. Glenn Greenwald and Ewan Macaskill have both admitted publicly that Snowden only gave them around 60,000 documents.

However, Julian Sanchez quickly pointed out that the Pentagon is playing word games. It's saying (as noted in our assumptions) that the scope of what Snowden touched is staggering, not the actual damage. As Sanchez points out:

The first thing to note is that the Pentagon report does not concern the putative harm of disclosures about the National Security Agency programs that have been the focus of almost all Snowden-inspired stories published to date. Rather, the Defense Intelligence Agency's damage assessment deals only with the potential impact of "non-NSA Defense material" that the government believes Snowden may have obtained. Any harm resulting from the disclosure of NSA-related material – in other words, almost everything actually made public thus far – is not included in this assessment.

In fact, the unredacted portions of the report don't discuss published material at all. Instead, the Pentagon was assessing the significance of the information "compromised" by Snowden – all the documents they believe he copied, whether or not they ever see the light of day.

As Sanchez notes, it absolutely makes sense for the US government to assess the possible damage from other possible leaks based on what Snowden has touched, but it's wholly irresponsible for politicians and the press to misrepresent the report as looking at the actual harm caused by the leaks to date. Because that's not what the report says at all.

In summary:

In short: the Pentagon damage report concludes that the "staggering" cache of documents that Snowden might have taken (most of which he probably didn't) could potentially cause grave harm if disclosed to a foreign power (which, as far as we know, they haven't been), and assumed that only genuinely super-sensitive information gets classified (which top intelligence officials concede isn't true).

And yet, Snowden's critics are totally misrepresenting the report to say things it clearly does not say.

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]]>staggeringly-misleadinghttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140522/18023227342Thu, 15 May 2014 05:40:00 PDTZombie Apocalypse? The Pentagon Has A PlanTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140514/04142427227/zombie-apocalypse-pentagon-has-plan.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140514/04142427227/zombie-apocalypse-pentagon-has-plan.shtml
If you're like me, you might be surprised to learn just where zombies turn up. For instance, an undead king-o-pop might show up in a video game. Or in a humor-driven warning from the Center for Disease Control. Or, as it turns out, amongst contingency plans by the Pentagon.

Buried on the military's secret computer network is an unclassified document, obtained by Foreign Policy, called "CONOP 8888." It's a zombie survival plan, a how-to guide for military planners trying to isolate the threat from a menu of the undead -- from chicken zombies to vegetarian zombies and even "evil magic zombies" -- and destroy them.

"This plan fulfills fictional contingency planning guidance tasking for U.S. Strategic Command to develop a comprehensive [plan] to undertake military operations to preserve 'non-zombie' humans from the threats posed by a zombie horde," CONOP 8888's plan summary reads. "Because zombies pose a threat to all non-zombie human life, [Strategic Command] will be prepared to preserve the sanctity of human life and conduct operations in support of any human population -- including traditional adversaries."

Ah, the undead sure do create cause for such strange bedfellows. It's a little bit heartwarming that the Pentagon would see fit to team up with our more-human adversaries against the zombie horde, isn't it? Imagine: the Taliban and the American military hand in hand, standing tall and steadfast against wave after wave of the undead. It's equal parts poetic and idealistic.

Now, lest anyone take this too seriously, like the CDC's warning, the Pentagon would like to stress that they don't actually think that this zombie apocalypse is, you know, going to happen.

Military planners assigned to the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska during 2009 and 2010 looked for a creative way to devise a planning document to protect citizens in the event of an attack of any kind. The officers used zombies as their muse. "Planners ... realized that training examples for plans must accommodate the political fallout that occurs if the general public mistakenly believes that a fictional training scenario is actually a real plan," the authors wrote, adding: "Rather than risk such an outcome by teaching our augmentees using the fictional 'Tunisia' or 'Nigeria' scenarios used at [Joint Combined Warfighting School], we elected to use a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken for a real plan."

In other words, rather than risk the paranoid hysteria that would revolve around a false plan to combat a real-life adversary, they made one up. It's actually humanizing to see a little humorous creativity coming from our men and women in uniform. And it appears the creators of the plan really did let their imagination fly. They designed methods to combat vegetarian zombies (yay!), evil magic zombies (sounds ominous), and chicken zombies (run, you stupid bastards!), outer space zombies (genre crossovers are so tired), bio-engineered zombies (calling Umbrella Corp.), and a pathogen-based zombie outbreak. Not all the military brass was impressed with the effort, it seems.

"I hope we've invested a similar level of intellectual rigor against dragon egg hatching contingencies," one defense official quipped.

Oh, you silly defense guy, untwist your shorts. Everyone knows there haven't been dragons in these parts in years.

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]]>the-best-braaaaainshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140514/04142427227Tue, 18 Mar 2014 15:26:31 PDTPentagon's Watchdog In Charge Of NSA Oversight Admits He Was 'Not Aware' Of NSA's Bulk Data CollectionMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140318/13445126616/pentagons-watchdog-charge-nsa-oversight-admits-he-was-not-aware-nsas-bulk-data-collection.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140318/13445126616/pentagons-watchdog-charge-nsa-oversight-admits-he-was-not-aware-nsas-bulk-data-collection.shtml"all three branches" of government. Of course, that's long since been debunked (especially seeing that all three branches have also demanded reforms to the very same programs). But one of the key points is that this "oversight" is usually not actually oversight at all, because the all important details are obfuscated or otherwise totally hidden from the overseers. And while this has been covered in fairly great detail about the lack of real oversight from Congress and the courts, what about the executive branch?

Well, wonder no more. The main guy in charge of supposedly "overseeing" the NSA's efforts and making sure that they're within the law (even if right up to the edges of it) is the Defense Department's Inspector General (currently Anthony C. Thomas), and he's just admitted that had no idea that the NSA was collecting bulk metadata on a huge swath of phone calls inside the US. According to a report by Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian:

“From my own personal knowledge, those programs, in and of themselves, I was not personally aware,” Thomas said.

He also admitted that the DOD isn't currently, nor does it have any plans to investigate the NSA's bulk surveillance efforts. Basically, he just leaves that up to the NSA's own Inspector General:

“If the NSA IG is looking into something and we feel that their reporting, their investigation is ongoing, we’ll wait to see what they find or what they don’t find, and that may dictate something that we may do. In the course of a planning process, we may get a hotline [call], or we may get some complaint that may dictate an action that we may or not take,” Thomas said.

Specifically on bulk NSA surveillance, Thomas said he was “waiting to see the information that the NSA IG brings forward with the investigations that are going on, and what we often do not want to do is conflict.”

So, this guy, who is in charge of the Pentagon's oversight of the NSA is basically taking a hands off approach to the NSA issue, letting them work out their own solution to what has been declared illegal and unconstitutional activities by two separate executive branch review panels. That doesn't inspire confidence. In fact, it inspires something entirely different: cynicism and a general distrust in government. For a government that keeps saying that the NSA has to rebuild "trust" with the American public, you'd think that it would start by actually having the people who have the mandate for oversight actually do something.

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]]>oversight!https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140318/13445126616Fri, 14 Feb 2014 03:48:00 PSTUS Military Looking To Trademark EverythingMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140109/07440325819/us-military-looking-to-trademark-everything.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140109/07440325819/us-military-looking-to-trademark-everything.shtmlthe Pentagon has gone trademark slap happy over the last five years or so (the headline of the article falsely implies that it has also gone copyright happy, despite barely mentioning copyright, and in the one spot it does, totally confusing copyright and trademarks).

The program began in 2007 when the Defense Department issued a directive calling for the component services to establish a branding and trademark licensing office, which would answer to the DOD level through a separate office working for the undersecretary of defense for public affairs. Holding to its tradition of being first in the fight, the Marines were the most aggressive in the early going. In 2009, they began contacting large-scale print-on-demand t-shirt suppliers Zazzle and CafePress. It immediately shut down several small online retailers of military-themed hats and shirts. It even came up with rules applying to USMC-themed stuff sold on Etsy.

The other services quickly caught up. Between 2007 and 2011, sales of officially-licensed U.S. Army merchandise increased from $5 million to $50 million

It does note that the military seems to realize that going after small retailers who are selling things face-to-face isn't wise, because "they're probably engaging in healthy patriotism." But, anyone else may be facing a bill from the Defense Department -- an organization that probably has the world's largest budget already. This should raise serious questions about why the US government should be granted trademarks in the first place. Yes, you could argue that the Defense Department doesn't want "shoddy" military merchandise out there, but is that really something the government needs to be concerned about? The US government isn't supposed to be a commercial enterprise. It could easily highlight and focus on "official" military gear to distinguish it from unofficial gear, without having to show up and force everyone else selling military-themed t-shirts that they need to kick back an extra "licensing" fee on top of any taxes they already have to pay.

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]]>because...-moneyhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140109/07440325819Tue, 1 Oct 2013 13:38:30 PDTUSAF Colonel: Starbucks WiFi Is More Secure Than The Pentagon NetworkTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20130929/15300424694/usaf-colonel-starbucks-wifi-is-more-secure-than-pentagon-network.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20130929/15300424694/usaf-colonel-starbucks-wifi-is-more-secure-than-pentagon-network.shtml
Some of the major issues raised during this NSA debacle have gone beyond the question of if the government should be collecting all of this data on roughly all the people to where this data is stored, what's done with it, and how access to it is controlled.They are big questions, because no matter what you think about the surveillance programs perpetrated against the American people, any inability to secure the information collected by the government should be an automatic deal-killer. So, how secure is data on government systems in general? Eh, go grab a cup of coffee before I tell you.

Col Mayberry ordered her team of lawyers to stop putting sensitive documents on that system in April, citing their ethical obligation to protect confidentiality. The lawyers have since been using personal computers to email documents from coffee shops and hotel lobbies. Col Mayberry cited evidence that defence files had been lost or altered, prosecutors and defence lawyers were temporarily given access to some of each other's emails, and outside monitors tracked defence researchers' work as they visited terrorism-related sites to prepare for the case.

Well isn't that a kick in the hard drive? The two possibilities, that either defense files were accessed by parties outside of the military or federal government, or that someone within the military and/or government was poking mortar-sized holes in the legal rights of the accused, each present their own frightening problems. But the result is the same. The same government that wants us to accept that information about us should be collected can't secure the systems on which that data is stored enough to protect our rights.

The prosecution predictably slammed the defense team, asking if they weren't "concerned about the nice man in the green apron looking over" their shoulders as they worked. Here's a fun thought experiment. Imagine you're on trial and you have two people to choose from to look at your defense team's information, strategies, etc. One is a barista. The other is a shadow of a profile picture, by which you can't determine who the hell is reviewing this stuff. Which one do you choose? Barista, or mystery avatar?

The point is that a government inept enough to have the kind of laughable security for legal proceedings sure as hell can't be trusted with my phone records. Period, paragraph, end of story.

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]]>thanks-a-lattehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130929/15300424694Fri, 6 Aug 2010 17:25:07 PDTPentagon Takes Head In Sand Approach To Wikileaks: Blocks All Access To Troops... Though Everyone Else Can Get InMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100806/13095610532.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100806/13095610532.shtmlresponse to Wikileaks just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The latest is that all military personnel are barred from going to Wikileaks and downloading material. Apparently, the military has actually put in place ridiculously crude filters that will block access to any URL that says Wikileaks. Of course, everyone else can still get to Wikileaks. How does this help at all?

Obviously, the government doesn't want military staff to leak stuff to Wikileaks, but this ban won't do that. If anything, it'll just call a lot more attention to the site. And the whole reasoning behind the ban is so nonsensical that it'll probably just make members of the military scratch their heads:

[W]illingly accessing the WIKILEAKS website for the purpose of viewing the posted classified material [constitutes] the unauthorized processing, disclosure, viewing, and downloading of classified information onto an UNAUTHORIZED computer system not approved to store classified information. Meaning they have WILLINGLY committed a SECURITY VIOLATION.

The thing is, the US military isn't who's interested in viewing that material, or the one who matters if they access that material. All this does is take a head-in-the-sand approach to Wikileaks, that maybe if military staff can't reach it directly, everyone will forget about it. We noted that the Pentagon's response to Wikileaks is like the RIAA's response to Napster, but this might be even more brain-dead. It would be like the RIAA setting up a filter for record labels so they can't even look at file sharing sites. It makes no sense.

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]]>that's-not-going-to-workhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100806/13095610532Fri, 6 Aug 2010 09:44:33 PDTHow The Pentagon's Reaction To Wikileaks Is Like The RIAA's Reaction To NapsterMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100806/02073410521.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100806/02073410521.shtmlattacks on Wikileaks, noting that it was the exact wrong approach to take. In writing that, I probably should have made the connection to some other, similarly short-sighted "attacks" on something one legacy group felt was a threat, but which actually was probably an opportunity -- and in attacking it, that legacy group only served to (1) draw more attention to it and (2) create even more, harder to work with, clones. I'm talking, of course, about the RIAA and its reaction to Napster.

While I didn't think of it, Raffi Khatchadourian did, and wrote a brilliant blog post for the New Yorker making the comparison (that's why he writes for The New Yorker, and I do not). Khatchadourian is actually responding to the equally ridiculous suggestion from former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, that the US should use the military to hunt Julian Assange down and bring him to justice and shut down Wikileaks, which Thiessen calls a "criminal syndicate" (say what?!?). Khatchadourian makes the connection:

Thiessen's argument calls to mind the music industry's effort to shut down Napster--a Web site where recorded music could be traded and downloaded without regard to copyright--in the nineteen-nineties, in that it loses sight of the broader technological and cultural revolution that the Internet has brought to the exchange of information. In 2001, after a lengthy legalbattle, the Recording Industry Association of America succeeded in forcing Napster offline, only to watch Napster's services move to a number of other Web sites that were structured in a more decentralized way (pdf)--making the piracy of music even more diffuse and difficult to prosecute. Only recently has the industry grudgingly been adapting to file-sharing rather than fruitlessly seeking to eliminate it, and one can now find musicexecutives who even speak of Napster as a lost opportunity for their industry.

Shutting WikiLeaks down--assuming that this is even possible--would only lead to copycat sites devised by innovators who would make their services even more difficult to curtail. A better approach for the Defense Department might be to consider WikiLeaks a competitor rather than a threat, and to recognize that the spirit of transparency that motivates Assange and his volunteers is shared by a far wider community of people who use the Internet.

Indeed. This is the same thing we've pointed out that the RIAA did with Napster -- losing a huge opportunity and instead driving such efforts totally underground. We've also chided the RIAA and others in the past for not recognizing that file sharing was "competition," and responding appropriately -- and it's a good point with Wikileaks and the Pentagon, even if it might not seem obvious at first. Khatchadourian points out that the analogy works when you realize that the "equivalent" to Wikileaks for the Pentagon is the Freedom of Information Act and the Mandatory Declassification Review -- but both are "slow and inconsistent." Wikileaks, on the other hand is much more efficient (just like Napster vs. the RIAA). He then notes how much of the attention Wikileaks has garnered could have been avoided if the Pentagon had actually embraced transparency and more efficiency:

It's worth recalling the first WikiLeaks project to garner major international attention: a video, shot from an Apache helicopter in 2007, in Iraq, that documented American soldiers killing up to eighteen people. For years, Reuters sought to obtain that video through FOIA because two of its staff members were among the victims. Had the military released this footage to the wire service, and made whatever minor redactions were necessary to protect its operations, there would never have been a film titled "Collateral Murder"--the name of WikiLeaks's package for the video--because there would have been nothing to leak. Even after Assange had published the footage, and even though the events documented in it had been previously revealed in detail by a Washington Post reporter, the military (at least, as of July) has still not officially released it.

In other words, the way to deal with such a competitor is to out innovate them. That certainly sounds familiar.

There's a reason Wikileaks exists, and it's not because it's a criminal syndicate, but because the folks behind it believe that there are serious problems in the way certain types of secrets are used to abuse power. So it represents a more efficient (if blunt) way of solving that. The same is true of the RIAA and Napster (and its descendants). The folks behind file sharing programs felt there were serious problems and inefficiencies with how industry gatekeepers used their gatekeeper role for abuse, rather than in the best interests of the market.

It won't happen (it never does), but Khatchadourian is spot on in noting that the Pentagon really should be recognizing that it's traveling down the same mistaken path as the RIAA, rather than just copying the same types of moves.

"We want whatever they have returned to us and we want whatever copies they have expunged," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters today at a news briefing.

"We demand that they do the right thing," he said. "If doing the right thing is not good enough for them, then we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing."

First of all, it's kind of laughable to think about "returning" digital documents. That's... um... not how technology works. You would think that the Defense Department with all their high tech doodads and missiles and stuff would understand that. Second, Wikileaks is not a US organization, so it's not clear what jurisdiction actually applies here. Really, this is all just posturing. The Pentagon knows that Wikileaks isn't going to "return" or "expunge" any documents. The reason for making this statement is basically a way to fire a "warning shot" at Wikileaks, which is sort of fitting for an old military mindset.

But, of course, it's about as far from the right response as you can possibly think of these days. In making such a declaration, it not only does more to legitimize and promote Wikileaks, but to alert plenty of others that the Pentagon is actually scared of Wikileaks. Demanding the documents be returned obviously won't lead to that result, but it will actually give Wikileaks much more prominence, and anyone thinking of leaking secret gov't documents will immediately think of Wikileaks first.

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]]>let-me-'splain-technology-to-youhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100805/18022410518Tue, 4 Sep 2007 11:23:35 PDTIn A World Of Global Commerce... Does Gov't Cyber Espionage Get In The Way Of Business?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070904/021935.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070904/021935.shtmlhype than substance to those articles (which, it was later discovered, were kicked off by a writer who eventually was accused of making up many stories written for a variety of mainstream press publications). However, the latest news suggests that folks in the Chinese military may have actually hacked into a defense department computer, leading to all the standard talk of "cyberwar." Of course, once again, the important details were missing. It's not clear the hack attacks actually did anything serious or accessed any important data.

A more important point may be that these types of attacks can be quite counter-productive. A recent report in Germany also had found that the Chinese military had at least tried to hack into gov't computers there -- and it's simply hurting the ability of Chinese tech firms to sell their goods abroad. In other words, while it may be true that the Chinese military may be trying to hack into computers of various governmental agencies around the world, doing so could actually end up causing quite a bit more pain to the Chinese economy. That hardly seems productive.